Fw: view from the other side ....

[colkitto]

> an article by Peter Hitchens, Christopher's brother
>
> http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
>
> Other People's Countries and What We Should do About Them
> Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
>
>
> Once I used to think that we could and should seek to turn Russia into a
> democracy, perhaps even restore its butchered monarchy, stripped of its 
> old
> autocratic powers.
>
> In the Soviet era, it was a tempting thing to think. Everywhere I 
> travelled
> in that desperately sad and ruined land, there were sights to make you
> weep - desecrated churches, the crumbling, despoiled remnants of lovely 
> old
> cities vandalised by Communist oafs. The people themselves looked
> downtrodden and stripped of culture. Manners were bad, the language 
> sounded
> coarse and debased to returning exiles.
>
> And, hard as it is to recall now, the old Kremlin regime used to be 
> swollen
> with arrogant power, flattening civil society in Poland and 
> Czechoslovakia,
> corrupting and distorting civilised life in Hungary, imprisoning half of
> Berlin and a quarter of Germany. I travelled in all these places and would
> sometimes find myself near to tears as a result of encounters with
> individual good people who - hearing my English voice on a tram or in a
> cafe - would quietly approach me and tell me how much they valued the BBC
> World Service, or how much they admired British freedoms. This feeling was
> often intensified by the melancholy beauty of the places lost in the
> yellowish-brown fog of Soviet power - the haunted streets of Prague, the
> great Hanseatic old town of Gdansk, the still-shattered streets of Dresden
> with the charred wreckage of the Frauenkirche lying in a great shocking 
> heap
> 40 years after the bombs ceased to fall. I remember specially the two 
> black
> Cuban students - one named after Horatio Nelson and better-informed about
> Britain's history than most British students of his age - who, having
> spotted us in our Prague hotel - came quietly to our room with a bottle of
> rum so that we could discuss politics freely together into the small 
> hours.
>
> The trouble was that, when I went to live in Moscow in June 1990, I 
> quickly
> came to like Russians, and to see that their society was a good deal more
> complex than I had thought. It was also much more similar to the more
> socialist parts of Britain than most people recognised. Though it was
> interesting that the state schools in Moscow were far better than their
> equivalents in London.
>
> I think this was because in Moscow the argument about power and authority
> had been resolved long ago. But in Britain, the left still disputed the
> right of the existing ruling elite to be in charge, and used the schools 
> as
> a weapon of change. Schools can only have discipline and authority if
> everyone agrees more or less about what should be taught. Our disputes,
> about history, or what is literature, are really arguments about what kind
> of country Britain should be. The distaste of many teachers for hard,
> top-down authority (and for what they call 'rote-learning' and I call
> 'learning by heart' of such things as times tables, dates or poems) is a
> reflection of the fact that many of them are radicals, and don't really
> accept the authority of Britain' s conservative state.
>
> The Left has for a century challenged the conservative, monarchist view. 
> The
> history curriculum, the English literature curriculum, even geography, 
> have
> until recently been conservative by their nature.
>
> In the early years of the USSR, when it still regarded itself as a
> revolutionary society, I think there was a lot of 'progressive' nonsense 
> in
> the schools, just as there was in personal morality. But Stalin put an end
> to any further discussion on these things, the schools became places of
> tough, top-down authority where everything was settled and nobody 
> disagreed.
> The interesting thing was that the authority in this case was left-wing. 
> If
> the left ever fully triumph in Britain, I expect there will be a 
> Stalin-like
> return to school discipline, 'rote-learning' and top-down authority, led 
> by
> the very people who have spent the last 30 years undermining all these
> things.
>
> The thing was, that while we in the West were all enraptured by Mikhail
> Gorbachev's exciting perestroika and glasnost reforms, all the Russians I
> met were disgusted by them. For them, these changes meant shortages of
> goods, loss of jobs, unpaid wages. inflation and a feeling of national
> humiliation. In those days my Russian was good enough to converse on 
> basics
> with the people who, for a few roubles, provided Moscow's informal taxi
> service in their own private cars or, on some occasions, in military
> vehicles or even Communist Party official limousines. Almost without
> exception, they longed for the 'Zolotoye Vremya' , the 'Golden Time' of
> Leonid Brezhnev, when there had always been enough sausage, vodka and 
> medals
> to go round, and the country had been respected abroad.
>
> The only exceptions to this were the people of the outlying, conquered
> states such as the Baltic Republics, who hated being ruled by Russia with 
> a
> passion,. But they too despised Gorbachev because they didn't trust him to
> give them independence. They were dead right. I was in Lithuania in 
> January
> 1991 when the KGB stormed the Vilnius TV tower to try to forestall the
> independence movement, and very nasty it was.
>
> Perhaps it was Stockholm syndrome, but I began to feel a bit of sympathy 
> for
> the Russians. I remember James Baker, the first George Bush's Secretary of
> State, sweeping into Moscow and virtually ordering the Kremlin to wind up
> the Warsaw Pact. What did it matter? The Warsaw Pact was beaten, finished,
> would have shrivelled away into nothing if left alone. He was kicking them
> when they were down. And, at the Foreign Ministry press centre, I asked 
> him
> why he felt it necessary to humiliate Russia in this way. He gave no good
> answer (as a Brit, I wasn't even supposed to ask him a question, a 
> privilege
> reserved for his own travelling circus of State Department correspondents.
> But I had learned in combat with the Labour Party how to break into press
> conferences where you weren't wanted). Several Russian diplomats came up 
> to
> me afterwards and thanked me for what I had said. And I, who had until a 
> few
> years ago been a militant Cold Warrior, didn't feel in the slightest bit
> disloyal. It had been Communism I wanted to beat, not Russia or the 
> Russian
> people.
>
> As for kicking them when they were down, the old joke was that you 
> shouldn't
> do this because your victim might get up. And in Russia's case, he has got
> up and those who kicked him can expect to pay for it. That includes us. In
> the brief period when Communism was finished and Russia could have been
> reborn, I don't know how much we might have done to make things better. 
> But
> it still seems to me that we did the worst things we could possibly have
> done.
>
> We acted like total victors and imagined that this huge, ancient country
> would always remain prostrate. We moved NATO up to its borders (having 
> said
> that we wouldn't). We interfered openly in the Baltic and the Caucasus,
> places which we will ( as we have before) quietly betray when we lose
> interest, and become too poor or too heavily committed elsewhere to help
> them. We reunified Germany with amazing speed and lack of thought.
>
> Perhaps even worse, we forced a market economy on them, as if such a thing
> could function for ten minutes without the rule of law, and a proper, fair
> tax system. And we told them they must be 'democratic'. that is to say, 
> hold
> elections. The results - gangsterism, the collapse of the rouble, the 
> wiping
> out of millions of jobs, the creation of a robber class (many of them 
> former
> Communist apparatchiks) and some of the most corrupt 'democratic' politics
> outside South America, has not been specially popular. In fact, as I
> mentioned in my Sunday article, many Russians use the expression
> 'Dermokratiya' ('Democracy' in Russian is 'Demokratiya'), which translates
> as 'The Rule of S***'. They quite like Vladimir Putin precisely because 
> they
> think he is not associated with that time. they like his rough, aggressive
> manner and the way he makes Russia look tough abroad. And they support his
> system of 'Sovereign Democracy' which is fast turning into a manipulated
> autocracy.
>
> Do I blame them? Not all that much. Can we preach to them about it? Not 
> now,
> we can't. After all, a jaundiced Russian reporter visiting London could
> truthfully write this about Britain:
>
> "Under its corrupt government, which is widely believed to sell seats in 
> the
> upper house of parliament in return for contributions to ruling party 
> funds,
> the once-free nation of Britain is rapidly turning into a police state.
> Pre-trial detention, once limited to 72 hours, is being repeatedly 
> extended
> to far longer periods. Old rules about the accused being innocent until
> proved guilty are being cast aside. The right to silence has been 
> abolished
> and so has the law which prevented anyone being tried twice for the same
> offence. The police increasingly take action against individuals for
> expressing opinions which defy 'political correctness', the official
> orthodoxy of the British state. The major Churches claim that new laws
> discriminate against their freedom of conscience. The streets are under
> perpetual surveillance by closed -circuit TV cameras recording every 
> action.
> The citizens are shortly to be issued with internal passports similar to
> Russian ones, and will be compelled to provide their fingerprints to their
> authorities. Schoolchildren are already being fingerprinted on such 
> pretexts
> as allowing library access. The police increasingly use arrests - not
> followed by charges - to harass those they wish to pursue - and anyone
> arrested - whether convicted or not - is now compelled to give a DNA 
> sample.
> As a result, Britain now has the most comprehensive DNA records of its
> population, anywhere in the world. Many state bodies now have the power to
> search people's homes, and the old maxim that 'An Englishman's Home is His
> Castle' is now so untrue as to be laughable. Elections are still held, but
> are a sham in which all the parties have more or less the same policies. 
> The
> main political movements, which have lost much of their popular support, 
> are
> kept going by state subsidies and contributions from millionaire
> businessmen. The main state-owned broadcasting system is slavishly loyal 
> to
> the government and keeps minority viewpoints off the air, or treats them
> with contempt and derision, while the other channels mostly purvey 
> low-grade
> pornographic entertainment, so-called 'reality' shows of stunning 
> banality,
> old movies and sport. Meanwhile, actual crime is out of control, though
> citizens are legally prevented from many actions of self-defence and a
> government minister recently advised Britons to 'jump up and down' if they
> saw an old woman being attacked in the street, in the hope of distracting
> the attacker. This is the country which lectures Russia about 'civil
> society' and 'human rights'. "
>
> The above is more or less true, and, while none of it excuses any of the
> wrongs being done in Russia (or anywhere else) it makes this point: how
> entitled are we to lecture other countries on their internal arrangements?
> Shouldn't we start by examining our own faults, and condemning our own
> abuses, before going round the place delivering lectures - or come to 
> that,
> invading and bombing other countries because we think they are badly-run?
> What I learned from my time in Russia was this - that law, liberty and
> conscience were priceless possessions, and that the real central combat in
> modern societies was not class struggle or left versus right, but the 
> battle
> between private life and the state, family and government. We can 
> certainly
> learn from other nations, but the main thing we in Britain should learn 
> from
> them is to preserve what is valuable and unique about our country. When we
> have successfully done that, perhaps we can offer instruction courses to
> others."
> 

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